The Teaching Of Jesus By The Rev. George Jackson - ebook

The Teaching Of Jesus
THE TEACHING
OF JESUS
BY THE REV. GEORGE JACKSON, B.A.
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“Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of
Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the
same hath both the Father and the Son.”--2 JOHN IX (R.V.).
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PREFACE
The following chapters are the outcome of an attempt to set
before a large Sunday evening congregation—composed for the
most part of working men and women—the teaching of our
Lord on certain great selected themes. The reader will know,
therefore, what to look for in these pages. If he be a trained
Biblical scholar he need go no further, for he will find nothing
here with which he is not already thoroughly familiar.
On the other hand, the book will not be wholly without value
even to some of my brother-ministers if it serve to convince
them that a man may preach freely on the greatest themes of the
gospel, and yet be sure that the common people will hear him
gladly, if only he will state his message at once seriously and
simply, and with the glow that comes of personal conviction.
Indeed, one may well doubt if there is any other kind of
preaching that they really care for.
CONTENTS
I -INTRODUCTORY
II - CONCERNING GOD
III- CONCERNING HIMSELF
IV - CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
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V - CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
VI - CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
VII - CONCERNING MAN
VIII - CONCERNING SIN
IX - CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
X - CONCERNING PRAYER
XI - CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
XII - CONCERNING CARE
XIII - CONCERNING MONEY
XIV - CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
XV - CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT
XVI - CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
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INTRODUCTORY
“O Lord and Master of us all!
Whate’er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.
We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
The Light, the Truth, the Way.”
WHITTIER.
* * * * *
“A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people.
”LUKE xxiv.
19.
“A teacher come from God.” JOHN iii. 2.
In speaking of the teaching of Jesus it is scarcely possible at the
present day to avoid at least a reference to two other closely-
related topics, viz. the relation of Christ’s teaching to the rest of
the New Testament, and the trustworthiness of the Gospels in
which that teaching
is recorded. Adequate discussion of either of these questions
here and now is not possible; it must suffice to indicate very
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briefly the direction in which, as it appears to the writer, the
truth may be found.
First, then, as to the relation of the teaching of Jesus to the rest
of the New Testament, and especially to the Epistles of St. Paul.
There can be no doubt, largely, I suppose, through the influence
of the Reformers, that the words of Jesus have not always
received the attention that has been given to the writings of
Paul. Nor is this apparent misplacing of the accent the wholly
unreasonable thing which at first sight it may seem. After all,
the most important thing in the New Testament—that which
saves—is not anything that Jesus said, but what He did; not His
teaching, but His death. This, the Gospels themselves being
witness, is the culmination and crown of Revelation; and it is
this which, in the Epistles, and pre-eminently the Epistles of
Paul, fills so large a place. Moreover, it ought plainly to be said
that the Church has never been guilty of ignoring the words of
her Lord in the wholesale fashion suggested by some popular
religious writers of our day. Really, the Gospels are not a
discovery of yesterday, nor even of the day before yesterday.
They have been in the hands of the Church from the beginning,
and, though she has not always valued them according to their
true and priceless worth, she has never failed to number them
with the choicest jewels in the casket of Holy Scripture.
Nevertheless, it may be freely granted that the teaching of Jesus
has not always received its due at the Church’s hands.
“Theology,” one orthodox and Evangelical divine justly
complains, “has done no sort of justice to the Ethics of
Jesus.”[1] But in our endeavour to rectify one error on the one
side, let us see to it that we do not stumble into another and
worse on the other side. The doctrines of Paul are not so much
theological baggage, of which the Church would do well
straightway to disencumber itself.
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After all that the young science of Biblical Theology has done
to revealthe manifold variety of New Testament doctrine, the
book still remains aunity; and the attempt to play off one part of
it against another—theGospels against the Epistles, or the
Epistles against the Gospels—is tobe sternly resented and
resisted. To St. Paul himself any such rivalrywould have been
impossible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was no claimwhich
he made with more passionate vehemence than that the message
whichhe delivered was not his, but Christ’s. “As touching the
gospel which was preached by me,” he says, “neither did I
receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me
through revelation of Jesus Christ.”
The Spirit who spoke through him and his brother apostles was
not an alien spirit, but the Spirit of Christ, given according to
the promise of Christ, to make known the things of Christ; so
that there is a very true sense in which their words may be
called “the final testimony of Jesus to Himself.” “We have the
mind of Christ,” Paul said, and both in the Epistles and the
Gospels we may seek and find the teaching of Jesus.[2]
It is, however, with the teaching of Jesus as it is recorded in the
Gospels that, in these chapters, we are mainly concerned. We
come, therefore to our second question: Can we trust the Four
Gospels? And this question must be answered in even fewer
words than were given to the last. As to the external evidence,
let us hear the judgment of the great German scholar, Harnack.
Harnack is a critic who is ready to give to the winds with both
hands many things which are dear to us as life itself; yet this is
how he writes in one of his most recent works:“Sixty years ago
David Friedrich Strauss thought that he had almost entirely
destroyed the historical credibility, not only of the fourth, but
also of the first three Gospels as well. The historical criticism of
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two generations has succeeded in restoring that credibility in its
main outlines.”[3] When, from the external, we turn to the
internal evidence, we are on incontestable ground. The words of
Jesus need no credentials, they carry their own credentials; they
authenticate themselves.
Christian men and women reading, e.g., the fourteenth of St.
John’s Gospel say within themselves that if these are not the
words of Jesus, a greater than Jesus is here; and they are right.
The oft-quoted challenge of John Stuart Mill is as unanswerable
to-day as ever it was. “It is of no use to say,” he declares, “that
Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we
know not how much of what is admirable has been super-added
by the traditions of His followers.... Who among His disciples,
or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings
ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character
revealed in the Gospels?”[4]
I
Assuming, therefore, without further discussion, the essential
trustworthiness of the Gospel records, let us pass on to consider
in this introductory chapter some general characteristics of
Christ’s teaching as a whole.
Mark at the outset Christ’s own estimate of His words: “The
words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life;” “If a
man keep My word he shall never see death;” “Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away;”
“Every one which heareth these words of Mine and doeth them
“—with him Christ said it should be well; but “every one that
heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not”—upon him
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ruin should come to the uttermost. Sayings like these are very
remarkable, for this is not the way in which human teachers are
wont to speak of their own words; or, if they do so speak, this
wise world of ours knows better than to take them at their own
valuation. But the astonishing fact in the case of Jesus is that
the world has admitted His claim. Men who refuse utterly to
share our faith concerning Him and the significance of His life
and death, readily give to Him a place apart among the great
teachers of mankind. I have already quoted the judgment of
John Stuart Mill. “Jesus,” says Matthew Arnold, “as He appears
in the Gospels ... is in the jargon of modern philosophy an
absolute”[5]--we cannot get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the
verdict of Goethe: “Let intellectual and spiritual culture
progress, and the human mind expand, as much as it will;
beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of Christianity, as
it sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human mind will not
advance.”[6] It would be easy to multiply testimonies, but it is
needless, since practically all whose judgment is of any account
are of one mind.But now if, with these facts in our minds, and
knowing nothing else about the teaching of Jesus, we could
suppose ourselves turning for the first time to the simple record
of the Gospels, probably our first feeling would be one of
surprise that Jesus the Teacher had won for Himself such an
ascendency over the minds and hearts of men. For consider
some of the facts which the Gospels reveal to us. To begin with,
this Teacher, unlike most other teachers who have influenced
mankind, contented Himself from first to last with merely oral
instruction: He left no book; He never wrote, save in the dust of
the ground. Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have been
preserved by the evangelists are, comparatively speaking,
extremely few. Put them all together, they are less by one-half
or two-thirds than the words which it will be necessary for me
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to use in order to set forth His teaching in this little book. And
further, the little we have is, for the most part, so casual, so
unpremeditated, so unsystematic in its character. Once and
again, it is true, we get from the Evangelists something
approaching what may be called a set discourse; but more often
what they give us is reports of conversations—conversations
with His disciples, with chance acquaintances, or with His
enemies. Sometimes we find Him speaking in the synagogues;
but He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the dinner-table;
and, best of all, He loved to speak in the open air, by the
wayside, or the lake shore. Once, as He stood by the lake of
Gennesaret, the multitude was so great that it pressed upon
Him. Near at hand were two little fishing-boats drawn up upon
the beach, for the fishermen had gone out of them, and were
washing their nets. “And He entered into one of the boats,
which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the
land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes out of the
boat.” It is all so different from what we should have expected;
there is about it such an air of artless, homely simplicity.
Finally, we cannot forget that Jesus was a Jew speaking to
Jews. Son of God though He was, He was the son of a Jewish
mother, trained in a Jewish home, in all things the child of His
own time and race. Whatever else His message may have been,
it was, first of all, a message to the men of His own day;
therefore, of necessity, it was their language He used, it was to
their needs He ministered, it was their sins He condemned. The
mould, the tone, the colouring of His teaching were all largely
determined by the life of His country and His time.
Yet this is He concerning whom all ages cry aloud, “Never man
spake like this man.” This is He before whom the greatest and
the wisest bow down, saying, “Lord” and “Master.” How are
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we to explain it? Much of the explanation lies outside of the
scope of our present subject; but if we will turn back to the
Gospels again we may find at least a partial answer to our
question.
II
(I) I said just now that Christ’s teaching was addressed in the
first place to the Jews of His own day. Yet the note of
universality is as unmistakable as are the local tone and
colouring. Christ may speak as the moment suggests, but His
words are never for the moment only, but for all time. He
refused almost sternly to go unto any save unto the lost sheep of
the house of Israel; yet the Gospels make it abundantly plain
that in His own thoughts His mission was never limited to the
tiny stage within which, during His earthly years, He confined
Himself. “I am the light of the world,” He said; and in His last
great commission to His disciples He bade them carry that light
unto the uttermost parts of the earth. In the great High-Priestly
prayer He intercedes not only for His disciples, but for those
who through their word should believe on Him. “I will build
My church,” He declared, “and the gates of Hades shall not
prevail against it.”
(2) So, again, too, in regard to the form of Christ’s sayings; to
speakof their artlessness and homely simplicity is to tell only a
small partof the truth concerning them. They are, indeed and
especially thosespoken in Galilee, and reported for the most
part in the Synoptists, theperfection of popular speech. How the
short, pithy, sententious sayingscling to the memory like burs!
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Let almost any of them be commenced, andas Dr. Stalker says,
the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finishthe sentence.
Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, e.g., He
said,“Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also,”He was ready to risk the possibility of being
misunderstood by someprosaic hearer, that He might the more
effectually arouse men to a neglected duty. His language was
concrete, not abstract; He taught by example and illustration;
He thought, and taught others to think, in pictures. How often is
the phrase, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto----“ on His
lips! Moreover, His illustrations were always such as common
folk could best appreciate. The birds of the air, the lilies of the
field, the lamp on the lamp-stand, the hen with her chickens
under her wings, the servant following the plough, the shepherd
tending his sheep, the fisherman drawing his net, the sower
casting his seed into the furrow, the housewife baking her bread
or sweeping her house,--it was through panes of common
window-glass like these that Christ let in the light upon the
heaped-up treasures of the kingdom of God. No wonder “the
common people heard Him gladly”; no wonder they “all hung
upon Him listening”; or that they “came early in the morning to
Him in the temple to hear Him”! Yet, even in the eyes of the
multitude the plain homespun of Christ’s speech was shot with
gleams of more than earthly lustre.
There mingled—to use another figure—with the sweet music of
those simple sayings a new deep note their ears had never heard
before: “the multitudes were astonished at His teaching; for He
taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” It
was not the authority of powerful reasoning over the intellect,
reasoning which we cannot choose but obey; it was the
authority of perfect spiritual intuition. Christ never speaks as
one giving the results of long and painful gropings after truth,
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but rather as one who is at home in the world to which God and
the things of the spirit belong. He asserts that which He knows,
He declares that which He has seen.
(3) Another quality of Christ’s words which helps us to
understand their world-wide influence is their winnowedness,
their freedom from the chaff which, in the words of others,
mingles with the wholesome grain. The attempt is sometimes
made to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim for Christ as
the supreme teacher by placing a few selected sayings of His
side by side with the words of some other ancient thinker or
teacher. And if they who make such comparisons would put
into their parallel columns all the words of Jesus and all the
words of those with whom the comparison is made, we should
have neither right to complain nor reason to fear. Wellhausen
puts the truth very neatly when he says, “The Jewish scholars
say, ‘All that Jesus said is also to be found in the Talmud.’ Yes,
all, and a great deal besides.”[7] The late Professor G.J.
Romanes has pointed out the contrast in two respects between
Christ and Plato. He speaks of Plato as “the greatest
representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality”;
yet he says “Plato is nowhere in this respect as compared with
Christ.” While in Plato there are errors of all kinds, “reaching
even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking
to the moral sense,” there is, he declares, in literal truth no
reason why any of Christ’s words should ever pass away in the
sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from the
biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent
growth of human knowledge—whether in natural science,
ethics, political economy, or elsewhere—has had to discount
which seems to him one of the strongest arguments in favour of
Christianity.[8]
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(4) One other quality of Christ’s words, which specially
caught the attention of His hearers in the synagogue at
Nazareth, should not be overlooked: “All bare Him witness, and
wondered at the words of grace which proceeded out of His
mouth.” The reference is, as Dr. Bruce says,[9] rather to the
substance of the discourse than to the manner. That there was a
peculiar charm in the Teacher’s manner is undoubted, but it was
what He said, rather than the way in which He said it—the
message of grace, rather than the graciousness of the Messenger
—which caused the eyes of all in the synagogue to be fastened
on Him. He had just read the great passage from the Book of
the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor.
He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Then, when the reading was finished, and He had given back
the roll to the attendant, and was sat down, He began to say
unto them, “To-day hath this Scripture been fulfilled in your
ears.” This was His own programme; this was what He had
come into the world to do—to bear the burden of the weary and
the heavy-laden, to give rest unto all who would learn of Him.
This, then, is the Teacher whose words we are to study together
in these pages. He Himself is saying to us again, “He that hath
ears to hear let him hear.” See that ye refuse not Him that
speaketh. And again He says,
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“Take heed how ye hear.” Gracious as He is, this Teacher can
be also very stern. “If any man,” He says, “hear My sayings and
keep them not, I judge him not. ... He that receiveth not My
sayings hath one that judgeth him; the word that I speak, the
same shall judge him in the last day.” We read of some to
whom “good tidings” were preached, whom the word did not
profit. Let us pray that to writer and readers alike it may prove
the word of eternal life.
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II - CONCERNING GOD
“Our Father, who art in Heaven.
What meaneth these words?
God lovingly inviteth us, in this little preface, truly to
believe in Him, that He is our true Father, and that we are
truly His children; so that full of confidence we may more
boldly call upon His name, even as we see children with a kind
of confidence ask anything of their parents.”—LUTHER’S
CATECHISM.
* * * * *
_”Holy Father.”_--JOHN xvii. 11.
It is natural and fitting in an attempt to understand the teaching
of Jesus that we should begin with His doctrine of God. For a
man’s idea of God is fundamental, regulative of all his religious
thinking. As is his God, so will his religion be. Given the arc
we can complete the circle; given a man’s conception of God,
from that we can construct the main outlines of his creed. What,
then, was the teaching of Jesus concerning God?
I
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In harmony with what has been already said in the previous
chapter, concerning Christ’s manner and method as a teacher,
we shall find little or nothing defined, formal, systematic in
Christ’s teaching on this subject. In those theological
handbooks which piloted some of us through the troublous
waters of our early theological thinking, one chapter is always
occupied with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the existence of
God, and another with a discussion of what are termed the
Divine “attributes.” And for the purposes of a theological
handbook doubtless this is the right course to take. But this was
not Christ’s way. Search the four Gospels through, and
probably not one verse can be found which by itself would
serve as a suitable definition for any religious catechism or
theological textbook. Christ, we must remember, did not, in His
teaching, begin de novo. He never forgot that He was speaking
to a people whose were the law and the prophets and the
fathers; throughout He assumed and built upon the accepted
truths of Old Testament revelation. To have addressed elaborate
arguments in proof of the existence of God to the Jews would
have been a mere waste of words; for that faith was the very
foundation of their national life. Nor did Christ speak about the
“attributes” of God. Again that was not His way.
He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract,
and, therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He
acts. In parable, in story, and in His own life He sets God
before us, that so we may learn what He is, and how He feels
toward us.
Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament.
To understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching
about God, we must first of all put ourselves at the point of
view of a devout Jew of His day, and see how far he had been
brought by that earlier revelation which Christ took up and
20

carried to completion. What, then, did the Jews know of God
before Christ came?
They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: “Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God is one God.” It had been a hard lesson for
Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its
idolatries. But the cleansing fires had done their work at last,
and perhaps the world has never seen sterner monotheists than
were the Pharisees of the time of Christ.[10] And He whom
thus they worshipped as Sovereign they knew also to be holy:
“The Holy One of Israel,” “exalted in righteousness.” True,
Pharisaism had degraded the lofty conceptions of the great
Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think of God as caring
more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith,
making morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the
concern of the heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers
might blind themselves and deceive their disciples, the Jewish
Scriptures still remained to testify of God and righteousness,
and of the claims which a righteous God makes upon His
people: “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your
doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do
well.” Nor, accustomed though we are to think of the God of
the Old Testament as stern rather than kind, were the tenderer
elements wanting from the Jewish conception of Deity.
Illustration is not now possible, but a very little thought will
remind us that it is to the Hebrew psalmists and prophets that
we owe some of the most gracious and tender imagery of the
Divine love with which the language of devotion has ever been
enriched.
Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice to a faith which
has not always received its due, even at Christian hands, it is
21

impossible for us, looking back from our loftier vantage-
ground, to ignore its serious defects and limitations. It was an
exclusive faith. It magnified the privileges of the Jews, but it
shut out the Gentiles. God might be a Father to Israel, but to no
other nation under heaven did He stand in any such relation. It
was the refusal of Christ to recognize the barriers which the
pride of race had set up which more than anything else brought
Him into conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And when
once from the mind and heart of the Early Church the
irrevocable word had gone forth, “God is no respecter of
persons; but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh
righteousness, is acceptable to Him,” the final breach was
made; no longer could the new faith live with the old. And even
within the privileged circle of Judaism itself men’s best
thoughts of God and of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the individual.
Here and there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the heights
whereon man holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him
face to face, as a man with his friend. But with the people as a
whole, even as with their greatest prophets, not the individual,
but the nation, was the religious unit.
Such was the Old Testament idea of God. Now let us return to
the teaching of Jesus. And at once we discover that Christ let go
nothing of that earlier doctrine which was of real and abiding
worth. The God of Jesus Christ is as holy, as sovereign—or, to
use the modern term—as transcendent as the God of the
psalmists and the prophets. Their favourite name for God was
“King,” and Christ spake much of the “kingdom of God.” To
them God’s people were His servants, owing to Him allegiance
and service to the uttermost; we also, Christ says, are the
servants of God, to every one of whom He has appointed his
task, and with whom one day He will make a reckoning. But if
22

nothing is lost, how much is gained! It is not merely that in
Christ’s teaching we have the Old Testament of God over again
with a plus, the new which is added has so transformed and
transfigured the old that all is become new. To Jesus Christ, and
to us through Him, God is “the Father.”
It is, of course, well known that Christ was not the first to apply
this name to God. There is no religion, says Max Mueller,[11]
which is sufficiently recorded to be understood that does not, in
some sense or other, apply the term Father to its Deity. Yet this
need not concern us, for though the name be the same the
meaning is wholly different. There is no true comparison even
between the occasional use of the word in the Old Testament
and its use by Christ. For, though in the Old Testament God is
spoken of as the Father of Israel, it is as the Father of the
nation, not of the individual, and of that nation only. Even in a
great saying like that of the Psalmist:
“Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him,”
it is still only Israel that the writer has in view, though we
rightly give to the words a wider application. But there is no
need of argument.
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that its central,
ruling idea of God is not Fatherhood, but Kingship: “The Lord
reigneth.” Even in the Psalms, in which the religious aspiration
and worship of the ages before Christ find their finest and
noblest expression, never once is God addressed as Father. But
when we turn to the Gospels, how great is the contrast! Though
not even a single psalmist dare look up and say, “Father,” in St.
Matthew’s Gospel alone the name is used of God more than
forty times. Fatherhood now is no longer one attribute among
many; it is the central, determining idea in whose revealing
23

light all other names of God—Creator, Sovereign, Judge—must
be read and interpreted. And the God of Jesus Christ is the
Father, not of one race only, but of mankind; not of mankind
only, but of men.
II
It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel which Christ
proclaimed—so great and wonderful that all our poor words
tremble and sink down under the weight of the truth they vainly
seek to express. By what means has Christ put us into
possession of such a truth? How have we come to the full
assurance of faith concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two
ways: by His teaching and by His life; by what He said and by
what He did. And once more a paragraph must perforce do, as
best it can, the work of an essay.
To the ear and heart of Christ all nature spoke of the love and
care of God. “Behold the birds of the heaven,” He said; “they
sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your
heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value
than they?” And again He said, “Consider the lilies of the
field”—not the pale, delicate blossom we know so well, but
“the scarlet martagon” which “decks herself in red and gold to
meet the step of summer”—“Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say
unto you that even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed
like one of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass of the
field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall
He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” Or, He bade
men look into their own hearts and learn.
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“God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving;” from what is
best within ourselves we may learn what God Himself is like.
Once Christ spoke to shepherds: “What man of you, having a
hundred sheep, and having lost one of them”—how the faces in
the little crowd would light up, and their ears drink in the
gracious argument! You care for your sheep, but how much
better is a man than a sheep? If you would do so much for them,
will God do less for you? And once the word went deeper still,
as He spoke to fathers: “What man is there of you, who, if his
son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall
ask for a fish will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil,
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to
them that ask Him?” Why, Christ asks, why do you not let your
own hearts teach you? If love will not let you mock your child,
think you, will God be less good than you yourselves are?
But more even than by His words did Christ by His life reveal
to us the Father. “He that hath seen Me,” He said to Philip,
“hath seen the Father.” In what He was and did, in His life and
in His death, we read what God is. We follow Him from
Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to Gennesaret, from
Gennesaret to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane,
and to Calvary, and at every step of the way He says to us, “He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” We are with Him at the
marriage feast at Cana of Galilee, and in the midst of the
mourners by the city gate at Nain; we see Him as He takes the
little children into His arms and lays His hands upon them and
blesses them; we hear His word to her that was a sinner in the
house of Simon the Pharisee; we stand with John and with
Mary under the shadow of the Cross; and still, always and
everywhere, He is saying to us, “He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father; if ye had known Me ye should have known my
25

Father also.” Within the sweep of this great word the whole life
of Jesus lies; there is nothing that He said or did that does not
more fully declare Him whom no man hath seen at any time. To
read “that sweet story of old” is to put our hand on the heart of
God; it is to know the Father.
III
“Yes,” says some one, “it is a beautiful creed—if only one
could believe it.” Christ took the birds and the flowers for His
text, and preached of the love of God for man, but is that the
only sermon the birds and flowers preach to us? Does not
“nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine,” shriek against our
creed? And when we turn to human life the tragedy deepens.
Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain?
Why do the innocent suffer? Why are our hearts made to sicken
every day when we take up our morning paper? Why does not
God end the haunting horror of our social ills? They are old-
world questions which no man can answer. Yet will I not give
up my faith, and I will tell you why. “I cannot see,” Huxley
once wrote to Charles Kingsley, “one shadow or tittle of
evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomena of
the universe, stands to us in the relation of a Father—loves us,
and cares for us as Christianity asserts.” And, perhaps, if I
looked for evidence only where Huxley looked, I should say the
same; but I have seen Jesus, and that has made all the
difference. It is He, and He alone, who has made me sure of
God. He felt, as I have never felt, the horrid jangle and discord
of this world’s life; sin and suffering tore His soul as no soul of
man was ever torn; He both saw suffering innocence and
26

Himself suffered being innocent, and yet to the end He knew
that love was through all and over all, and died with the name
“Father” upon His lips. And, therefore, though the griefs and
graves of men must often make me dumb, I will still dare to
believe with Jesus that God is good and “Love creation’s final
law.”
But while thus, on the one hand, we use Christ’s doctrine of
God to our comfort, let us take care lest, on the other hand, we
abuse it to our hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever been a
time when the Church has not suffered through
“disproportioned thoughts” of God. To-day our peril is lest, in
emphasizing the Divine Fatherhood, we ignore the Divine
Sovereignty, and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without
either purpose or power to chastise His wilful and disobedient
children.
“God is good; God is love; why then should we fear? Will He
not deal tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving us even
unto seventy times seven?” The argument is true—and it is
false. As an assurance to the penitent and to the broken in heart,
it is true, blessedly true; in any other sense it is false as hell. He
whom Christ called, and taught us to call “Father,” He also
called “Holy Father” and “Righteous Father.” Have we
forgotten Peter’s warning—we do not need to ask at whose lips
he learned it—“If ye call on Him as Father ... pass the time of
your sojourning in fear.” This is no contradiction of the doctrine
of Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a modification of
it; rather is it an essential part of any true and complete
statement of it.
Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be
feared; that is to miss the whole point of his words; what he
means is, God is a Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the
fear follows necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah,
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brethren, if we understood Peter and Peter’s Lord aright, we
should be not the less, but the more anxious about our sins,
because we have learnt to call God “Father.” “Evil,” it has been
well said, “is a more terrible thing to the family than to the
state.”[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father
dare not, and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss
with light censure he must search out to its depths. The
judgment of a father—there is no judgment like that. And if it is
a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, for him
who all his life through has set himself against the Divine law
and love, it is a still more fearful thing because those hands are
the hands of a Father.
But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the
Fatherhood of God. Let us go back to a chapter from which,
though I have only once quoted its words, we have never been
far away—the fifteenth of St. Luke, with its three-fold
revelation of the seeking love of God. The parables of the
chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied together
in the light of the circumstances which were their common
origin. “The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This
man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.” These parables
are Christ’s answer. Mark how He justifies Himself. He might
have pleaded the need of those whom the Pharisees and scribes
had left alone in their wretchedness and sin, but of this He says
nothing; His thoughts are all of the need of God. The central
thought in each parable is not what man loses by his sin, but
what God loses. As the shepherd misses his lost sheep, and the
woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son, so, Christ says,
we are all missed by God until, with our heart’s love, we satisfy
the hunger of His.
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The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the rest. We have all
read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how she went
into the far country, and what brought her home again. “It iss
weary to be in London”—this was Flora’s story as she told it to
Marget Howe when she was back again in the glen—“it iss
weary to be in London and no one to speak a kind word to you,
and I will be looking at the crowd that is always passing, and I
will not see one kent face, and when I looked in at the lighted
windows the people were all sitting round the table, but there
was no place for me. Millions and millions of people, and not
one to say ‘Flora,’ and not one sore heart if I died that night.”
Then one night she crept into a church as the people were
singing. “The sermon wass on the Prodigal Son, but there is
only one word I remember. ‘You are not forgotten or cast off,’
the preacher said:‘you are missed.’ Sometimes he will say, ‘If
you had a plant, and you had taken great care of it, and it was
stolen, would you not miss it?’
And I will be thinking of my geraniums, and saying ‘Yes’ in
my heart. And then he will go on, ‘If a shepherd wass counting
his sheep, and there wass one short, does he not go out to the
hill to seek for it?’
and I will see my father coming back with that lamb that lost its
mother. My heart wass melting within me, but he will still be
pleading, ‘If a father had a child, and she left her home and lost
herself in the wicked city, she will still be remembered in the
old house, and her chair will be there,’ and I will be seeing my
father all alone with the Bible before him, and the dogs will lay
their heads on his knee, but there iss no Flora. So I slipped out
into the darkness and cried, ‘Father,’ but I could not go back,
and I knew not what to do. But this wass ever in my ear,
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‘missed,’”—and this was the word that brought her back to
home and God.[13]
30

III - CONCERNING HIMSELF
“_Who say ye that I am_?”—MATT. Xvi. 15.
“Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was
Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is
no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.”
JOHN DUNCAN, _Colloquia
Peripatetica_.
I
This was our Lord’s question to His first disciples; and this, by
the mouth of Simon Peter, was their answer: “Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the living God.” And in all ages this has been
the answer of the Holy Catholic Church throughout all the
world. In the days of New Testament Christianity no other
answer was known or heard. The Church of the apostles had its
controversies, as we know, controversies in which the very life
of the Church was at stake. Division crept in even among the
apostles themselves. But concerning Christ they spoke with one
voice, they proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the
Christian era were centuries of keen discussion concerning the
Person of our Lord; but the discussions sprang for the most part
from the difficulty of rightly defining the true relations of the
Divine and the human in the one Person, rather than from the
denial of His Divinity; and, as Mr. Gladstone once pointed out,
since the fourth century the Christian conception of Christ has
remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce and almost
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ceaseless controversies which have divided and sometimes
desolated Christendom, and which, alas! still continue to divide
it, the Church’s testimony concerning Christ has never
wavered. The Greek Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the
various Protestant Churches, Lutherans, Anglicans,
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Christian men
and women out of every tribe and tongue and people and
nation,--all unite to confess the glory of Christ in the words of
the ancient Creed: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-
begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God.”
This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the Christian way of
thinking about Christ. But now the question arises, Was this
Christ’s way of thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim
to be one with God? or, is it only we, His adoring disciples,
who have crowned Him with glory and honour, and given Him
a name that is above every name? To those of us who have been
familiar with the New Testament ever since we could read, the
question may appear so simple as to be almost superfluous.
Half-a-dozen texts leap to our lips in a moment by way of
answer. Did Henot claim to be the Messiah in whom Old
Testament history and prophecyfound their fulfilment and
consummation? Did He not call Himself the Sonof God, saying,
“The Father hath given all judgment unto the Son; that allmay
honour the Son, even as they honour the Father”? Did He not
declare,“I and My Father are one”? and again, “All things have
been delivered unto Me of My Father: and no one knoweth the
Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him”?
And when one of the Twelve bowed down before Him, saying,
“My Lord and my God,” did He not accept the homage as
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though it were His by right? What further need, then, have we
of witnesses? Is it not manifest that the explanation of all that
has been claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles until
now, is to be found in what Christ claimed for Himself?
This is true; nevertheless it may be well to remind ourselves
that Christ Himself did not thrust the evidence on His disciples
in quite this wholesale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for
us to scour the New Testament for “proof-texts,” and then,
when they are heaped together at our feet like a load of bricks,
to begin to build our theological systems. But Peter and Thomas
and the other disciples could not do this. The revelation which
we possess in its completeness was given to them little by little
as they were able to receive it. And the moment we begin to
study the life of Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by day it
passed before the eyes of the Twelve, we cannot fail to observe
the remarkable reserve which, during the greater part of His
ministry, He exercised concerning Himself. When first His
disciples heard His call and followed Him, He was to them but
a humble peasant teacher, who had flung about their lives a
wondrous spell which they could no more explain than they
could resist. Indeed, there is good reason to believe, as Dr. Dale
has pointed out,[14] that the full discovery of Christ’s Divinity
only came to the apostles after His Resurrection from the dead.
At first, and for long, Christ was content to leave them with
their poor, imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry their
reason by storm; rather He set Himself to win them—mind,
heart, and will—by slow siege. He lived before them and with
them, saying little directly about Himself, and yet always
revealing Himself, day by day training them, often perhaps
unconsciously to themselves, “to trust Him with the sort of trust
which can be legitimately given to God only.”[15] And when at
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last the truth was clear, and they knew that it was the incarnate
Son of God who had companied with them, their faith was the
result not of this or that high claim which He had made for
Himself, but rather of “the sum-total of all His words and
works, the united and accumulated impression of all He was
and did” upon their sincere and receptive souls.[16]
Are there not many of us to-day who would do well to seek the
same goal by the same path? We have listened, perhaps, to
other men’s arguments concerning the Divinity of our Lord,
conscious the while how little they were doing for us. Let us
listen to Christ Himself. Let us put ourselves to school with
Him, as these first disciples did, and suffer Him to make His
own impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and receptive
souls as were theirs, from us also He shall win the adoring cry,
“My Lord and my God.” Let us note, then, some of the many
ways in which Christ bears witness concerning Himself. In a
very true sense all His sayings are “self-portraitures.” Be the
subject of His teaching what it may, He cannot speak of it
without, in some measure at least, revealing His thoughts
concerning Himself; and it is this indirect testimony whose
significance I wish now carefully to consider.
II
Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks of God and of His
own relation to Him. He called Himself, as we have already
noted, “the Son of God.” Now, there is a sense in which all men
are the sons of God, for it is to God that all men owe their life.
And there is, further, as the New Testament has taught us,
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another and deeper sense in which men who are not may
“become” the sons of God, through faith in Christ. But Christ’s
consciousness of Sonship is distinct from both of these, and
cannot be explained in terms of either. He is not “_a_ son of
God”—one among many---He is “_the_ son of God,” standing
to God in a relationship which is His alone. Hence we find—
and we shall do well to mark the marvellous accuracy and self-
consistency of the Gospels in this matter—that while Jesus
sometimes speaks of “_the_ Father,” and sometimes of “_My_
Father,” and sometimes, again, in addressing His disciples, of
“_your_ Father,” never does He link Himself with them so as to
call God “_our_ Father.” Nowhere does the distinction, always
present to the mind of Christ, find more striking expression than
in that touching scene in the garden in which the Risen Lord
bids Mary go unto His brethren and say unto them, “I ascend
unto My Father and your Father, and My God and your
God.”This sense of separateness is emphasized when we turn to
the prayers of Christ. And in this connection it is worthy of note
that though Christ has much to say concerning the duty and
blessedness of prayer, and Himself spent much time in prayer,
yet never, so far as we know, did He ask for the prayers of
others. “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he
might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for thee, that
thy faith fail not.” So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but we
never read that they prayed for Him, or that He asked for
Himself a place in their prayers. How significant the silence is
we learn when we turn to the Epistles of St. Paul and to the
experience of the saints. “Brethren, pray for us”—this is the
token in almost every Epistle. In the long, lone fight of life even
the apostle’s heart would have failed him had not the prayers of
unknown friends upheld him as with unseen hands. There is no
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stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the plea for
remembrance at the throne of God. “Pray for me, will you?” we
cry, when man’s best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet
long enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living tomb.
But the cry which is so often ours was never Christ’s.
It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ’s
intercourse with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with
them.[17] He prayed in their presence, He prayed for them, but
never with them. “It came to pass, as He was praying in a
certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said
unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his
disciples. And He said unto them, When ye pray, say----.”
Then follows what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.” But, properly
speaking, this was not the Lord’s prayer; it was the disciples’
prayer: “When ye pray, say------.” And when we read the prayer
again, we see why it could not be His. How could He who knew
no sin pray, saying, “Forgive us our sins”? The true “Lord’s
Prayer” is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s
Gospel. And throughout that prayer the holy Suppliant has
nothing to confess, nothing to regret. He knows that the end is
nigh, but there are no shadows in His retrospect; of all that is
done there is nothing He could wish undone or done otherwise.
“I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work
which Thou hast given Me to do.” It is so when He comes to
die. Among the Seven Words from the Cross we are struck by
one significant omission: the dying Sufferer utters a cry of
physical weakness—“I thirst”—but He makes no
acknowledgement of sin; He prays for the forgiveness of others
—“Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do”—He
asks none for Himself. The great Augustine died with the
penitential Psalms hung round his bed. Fifty or sixty times, it is
said, did sweet St.
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Catharine of Siena cry upon her deathbed, _Peccavi, Domine
miserere mei_, “Lord, I have sinned: have mercy on me.” But
in all the prayers of Jesus, whether in life or in death, He has no
pardon to ask, no sins to confess.
We are thus brought to the fact upon which of recent years so
much emphasis has been justly laid, namely, that nowhere
throughout the Gospels does Christ betray any consciousness of
sin. “Which of you,” He said, “convicteth Me of sin?” And no
man was able, nor is any man now able, to answer Him a word.
But the all-important fact is not so much that they could not
convict Him of sin; He could not convict Himself.
Yet it could not be that He was self-deceived. “He knew what
was in man;” He read the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan
woman, they felt as though He knew all things that ever they
had done. Was it possible, then, that He did not know Himself?
Not only so, but the law by which He judged Himself was not
theirs, but His. And what that was, how high, how searching,
how different from the low, conventional standards which
satisfied them, we who have read His words and His judgments
know full well. Nevertheless, He knew nothing against
Himself;as no man could condemn Him neither could He
condemn Himself. Looking upto heaven, He could say, “I do
always the things that are pleasing to Him.”[18] This is not the
language of sinful men; it is not the language of even the best
and holiest of men. Christ is as separate from “saints” as He is
from “sinners.” The greatest of Hebrew prophets cries, “Woe is
me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I
dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” The greatest of
Christian apostles laments, “O wretched man that I am! who
shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Even the holy
John confesses, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It is one of the
37

commonplaces of Christian experience that the holier men
become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of
personal shortcoming. “We have done those things which we
ought not to have done; we have left undone those things which
we ought to have done:” among all the sons of men there is
none, who truly knows himself, who dare be silent when the
great confession is made—none save the Son of Man; for He, it
has well been said, was not the one thing which we all are; He
was not a sinner.
This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the
evangelists have told us concerning Christ. When e.g. He is
preaching He never associates Himself, as other preachers do,
with His hearers; He never assumes, as other preachers must,
that His words are applicable to Himself equally with them. We
exhort; He commands. We say, like the writer of the Epistle to
the Hebrews, “Let us go on unto perfection”; He says, “Ye shall
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We speak as
sinful men to sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as
from a height, as one who has already attained and is already
made perfect. Or, the contrast may be pointed in another way.
We all know what it is to be haunted by misgivings as to the
wisdom of some course which, under certain trying
circumstances, we have taken. We had some difficult task to
perform—to withstand (let us say) a fellow-Christian to his
face, as Paul withstood Peter at Antioch; and we did the
unpleasant duty as best we knew how, honestly striving not
only to speak the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when all
was over we could not get rid of the fear that we had not been
as firm or as kindly as we should have been, that, if only
something had been which was not, our brother might have
been won. There is a verse in Paul’s second letter to the Church
38

at Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind of internal
conflict. Referring to the former letter which he had sent to the
Corinthians, and in which he had sharply rebuked them for their
wrong-doing, he says, “Though I made you sorry with my
epistle, I do not regret it, though I did regret”—a simple, human
touch we can all understand. Yes; but when did Jesus hesitate
and, as it were, go back upon Himself after this fashion? He
passed judgment upon men and their ways with the utmost
freedom and confidence; some, such as the Pharisees, He
condemned with a severity which almost startles us; towards
others, such as she “that was a sinner,” He was all love and
tenderness. Yet never does He speak as one who fears lest
either in His tenderness or His severity He has gone too far. His
path is always clear; He enters upon it without doubt; He looks
back upon it without misgiving.
This contrast between Christ and all other men, as it presented
itself to His own consciousness, may be illustrated almost
indefinitely. His forerunners the prophets were the servants of
God; He is His Son. All other men are weary and in need of
rest; He has rest and can give it. All others are lost; He is not
lost, He is the shepherd sent to seek the lost. All others are sick;
He is not sick, He is the physician sent to heal the sick. All
others will one day stand at the bar of God; but He will be on
the throne to be their Judge. All others are sinners—this is the
great, final distinction into which all others run up—He is the
Saviour. When at the Last Supper He said, “This is My blood of
the covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins”;
and again, when He said, “The Son of Man came to give His
life a ransom for many,” He set Himself over against all others,
the one sinless sacrifice for a sinful world.
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There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which bears carved on
its front these words of St. Paul. “There is one God, and one
mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” I say
nothing as to the fitness of any of Paul’s words for such a place
—perhaps we can imagine what he would have said; I pass over
any questions of interpretation that might very justly be raised;
I have only one question to ask: Why was the quotation not
finished? Paul only put a comma where they have put a full
stop; the next words are: ”Who gave Himself a ransom for all.”
But how could He do that if He was only “the man Christ
Jesus”?
“No man can save his brother’s soul,
Nor pay his brother’s debt,”
and how could He, how dare He, think of His life as the ransom
for ourforfeited lives, if He were only one like unto ourselves?
There is but one explanation which does really explain all that
Christ thought andtaught concerning Himself; it is that given by
the first disciples andre-echoed by every succeeding generation
of Christians—
“THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST.
THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THE
FATHER.”
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IV - CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
“While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy trust,
confide in nothing else besides; to this death commit thyself
altogether; with this shelter thy whole self; with this death array
thyself from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge
thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and me I cast the death
of our Lord Jesus Christ; no otherwise can I contend with Thee.
And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch
forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and
Thee. If He say, Thou art worthy of condemnation, say, Lord, I
set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts
and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ought
to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth
with thee, say, Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between Thy wrath and me.”—ANSELM.
* * * * *
_”The Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom for
many.”_--MARK X. 45.
The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in
the
thought and teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, “I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the
41

Scriptures,” he is the spokesman of every Christian preacher
and teacher, of the missionary of the twentieth century no less
than of the first. It is with some surprise, therefore, we discover
when we turn to the teaching of Jesus Himself, that He had so
little to say concerning a subject of which His disciples have
said so much. It is true that the Gospels, without exception,
relate the story of Christ’s death with a fullness and detail
which, in any other biography, would be judged absurdly out of
proportion. But this, it is said, reveals the mind of the
evangelists rather than the mind of Christ. And those who love
that false comparison between the Gospels and the Epistles of
which so much is heard to-day, have not been slow to seize
upon this apparent discrepancy as another example of the way
in which the Church has misunderstood and misinterpreted the
simple message of the Galilean Prophet.
But, in the first place, as I will show in a moment, the contrast
between the Gospels and Epistles in this matter is by no means
so sharply defined as is often supposed. And further, granting
that there is a contrast—that what in the Gospels is only a hint
or suggestion, becomes in the Epistles a definite and formal
statement—it is one which admits of a simple and immediate
explanation. Christ—this was Dr. Dale’s way of putting it—did
not come to preach the gospel; He came that there might be a
gospel to preach. This must not be pressed so far as to imply
that it is only the death and not also the life of Christ that has
any significance for us to-day; but if that death had any
significance in it at all, if it was anything more to Him than
death is to us, if it stood in any sort of relation to us men and
our salvation, manifestly the teaching which should make this
plain would more fittingly follow than precede the death. And
they at least who accept Christ’s words, “I have yet many
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things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit
when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all
truth”—they, I say, who accept these words can find no
difficulty in believing that part of the revelation which it was
the good pleasure of the Father to give to us in His Son, came
through the lips of men who spake as they were moved by the
Holy Spirit. Moreover, when we turn to the Gospels we see at
once that the interpretation of Christ’s death was just one of
those things which the disciples as yet were unable to bear. The
point is so important that it is worth while dwelling upon it for a
moment. So far were the Twelve from being able to understand
their Lord’s death, that they would not even believe that He was
going to die. “Be it far from Thee, Lord,” cried Peter, when
Christ first distinctly foretold His approaching end; “this shall
never be unto Thee.” When, at another time, He said unto His
disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears; for the Son of
Man shall be delivered up into the hands of men,” St. Luke
adds, “But they understood not this saying.”
And again, after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist
writes with significant reiteration, “They understood none of
these things; and this saying was hid from them, and they
perceived not the things that were said.” So was it all through
those last months of our Lord’s life.
His thoughts were not their thoughts, neither were His ways
their ways. They followed Him as He pressed along the
highway, His face steadfastly set to go up to Jerusalem, but they
could not understand Him. Why, if as He had said, death waited
Him there, did He go to seek it? Think what utter powerlessness
to enter even a little way into His thoughts is revealed in a
scene like this: Two of His disciples, James and John, came to
43

Him to ask Him that they might sit, one on His right hand, and
one on His left hand, in His glory. Jesus said unto them, “Ye
know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink?
or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”
And they said unto Him, “We are able.” What could Jesus do
with ignorance like this—ignorance that knew not its own
ignorance? He could be “sorry for their childishness”; but how
could He show them the mystery of His Passion? What could
He do but wait until the Cross, and the empty grave, and the gift
of Pentecost had done their revealing and enlightening work?
At the same time, as I have already pointed out, it is altogether
a mistake to suppose that Christ has left us on this subject
wholly to the guidance of others. From the very beginning of
His ministry the end was before Him, and as it drew nearer He
spoke of it continually. At first He was content to refer to it in
language purposely vague and mysterious. Just as a mother who
knows herself smitten with a sickness which is unto death, will
sometimes try by shadowed hints to prepare her children for
what is coming, while yet she veils its naked horror from their
eyes, so did Jesus with His disciples. “Can the sons of the
bride-chamber fast,” He asked once, “while the bridegroom is
with them?
... But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken
away from them, and then will they fast in that day.” But from
the time of Peter’s great confession at Caesarea Philippi all
reserve was laid aside, and Christ told His disciples plainly of
the things which were to come to pass: “From that time began
Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto
Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests
and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up.” And
if we will turn to any one of the first three Gospels, we shall
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find, as Dr. Denney says, that that which “characterized the last
months of our Lord’s life was a deliberate and thrice-repeated
attempt to teach His disciples something about His death.”[19]
Let me try, very briefly, to set forth some of the things which
He said.
I
First of all, then, Christ died as a faithful witness to the truth.
Like the prophets and the Baptist before Him, whose work and
whose end were so often in His thoughts, He preached
righteousness to an unrighteous world, and paid with His life
the penalty of His daring. That is the very lowest view which
can be taken of His death. No Unitarian, no unbeliever, will
deny that Jesus died as a good man, choosing rather the shame
of the Cross than the deeper shame of treason to the truth. And
thus far Christ is an example to all who follow Him. In one
sense His cross-bearing was all His own, a mystery of suffering
and death into which no man can enter. But in another sense, as
St. Peter tells us, He has left us by His sufferings an example
that we should follow His steps. It is surely a significant fact
that the words which immediately follow Christ’s first distinct
declaration of His death are these, “If any man would come
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow
Me.” His death was the supreme illustration of a law which
binds us, the servants, even as it bound Him, the Master. In the
path of every true man there stands the cross which he must
bear, or be true no more. Let no one grow impatient and say this
is no more than the fringe of Christ’s thoughts about His death;
even the fringe is part of the robe, and if, as the words I have
45

quoted seem clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death as
in any sense at all a pattern for us, let us not miss this, the first
and simplest lesson of the Cross.
There are few more impressive scenes in the history of the
Christian pulpit than that in which Robertson of Brighton,
preaching the Assize Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed to
the judges, and counsel, and jury, and bade them remember, by
“the trial hour of Christ,” by “the Cross of the Son of God,” the
sacred claims of truth: “The first lesson of the Christian life is
this, Be true; and the second this, Be true; and the third this, Be
true.”
II
But though this be our starting-point, it is no more than a
starting-point.
If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the penalty
of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to
call Him “the Saviour of the world.” If His death were only a
martyrdom, then, though we may honour Him as we honour
Socrates, and many another name in the long roll of “the noble
army of martyrs,” yet He can no more be our Redeemer than
can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ thought of
His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died
because He would. The strong hands of violent men snatch
away the martyr’s life from him; but no man had power to take
away Christ’s life from Him: “I lay it down of Myself,” He
said. The Son of Man gave His life. He was not dragged as an
unwilling victim to the sacrifice and bound upon the altar. He
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was both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts it, “He gave
Himself up.” True, the element of necessity was there—“the
Son of Man must be lifted up”; but it was the “must” of His
own love, not of another’s constraint. Not Roman nails or
Roman thongs held Him to the Cross, but His own loving will.
It is important to emphasize this fact of the voluntariness of our
Lord’s death, because at once it sets the Cross in a clearer light.
It changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and Christ’s death, instead
of being merely a fate which He suffered, becomes now, as
Principal Fairbairn says, a work which He achieved--_the_
work which He came into the world to do: “The Son of Man
came ... to give His life.”[20]
III
Again, Christ taught us that His death was _the crowning
revelation of the love of God for man._ And it is well to remind
ourselves of our need of such a revelation. We speak sometimes
as though the love of God was a self-evident truth altogether
independent of the facts of New Testament history. “God is
love”—of course, we say; this at least we are sure of, whatever
becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear
looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no
certainty of the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears,
“God is love, God is love”; but if he have no more to say than
that, the most emphatic reiteration will avail us nothing. But if
he can say, “God is love, and He so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son”; if, that is to say, he can point us
to the Divine love made manifest in life, then he is proclaiming
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a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and imagine
that we can have Christ’s gospel apart from Christ.
Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ’s life
—all He was and said and did—is a revelation of the love of
God. But the crown of the revelation was given in His death. It
is the Cross which was, in a special and peculiar sense, as
Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory both of the Father and
the Son. And the apostles, with a unanimity which can only be
explained as the result of His own teaching, always associate
God’s love with Christ’s death in a way in which they never
associate God’s love with Christ’s life. “God,” says St. Paul,
“commendeth His own love toward us, in that ... Christ died for
us.” Christ’s death, then, we say, establishes the love of God.
But how does this come to pass? How does the death of one
prove the love of another?
If—to use a very simple illustration—I am in danger of
drowning, and another man, at the cost of his own life, saves
mine, his act undoubtedly proves his own love; but how does it
prove anything concerning God’s love? If the apostle had said,
“_Christ_ commendeth His own love towards us, in that He
died for us,” we could have understood him; but how, I ask
again, does Christ’s death prove God’s love? The question is
answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is
intelligible, only on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine
of Christ. If Christ were indeed the Son of God, standing to
God in such a relation that what He did was likewise the doing
of God the Father, we can understand the apostle’s meaning.
On any other hypothesis his language is a riddle of which the
key has been lost. A further question still remains to be
answered. I said just now that if St. Paul had written, “_Christ_
commendeth His own love towards us, in that He died for us,”
we could have understood Him. But here, also, something is
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implicit which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in
His death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way:
by bearing responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen
upon us. There must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some
rational relation between our necessities and what Christ has
done before we can speak of His act as a proof of His love. If,
to borrow the same writer’s illustration, a man lose his own life
in saving me from drowning, this is love to the uttermost; but if,
when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself into the water
and got drowned “to prove his love for me,” the deed and its
explanation would be alike unintelligible. We must take care
when we speak of the death of Christ that we do not make it
equally meaningless.
How Christ Himself thought of it as related to the necessities of
sinful men, the next and last division of this chapter will, I
hope, make plain.
IV
_”The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many;”
“This is My blood of the covenant which is shed for many unto
remission of sins.”_
These are the two great texts which reveal to us the mind of
Christ concerning the significance of His death. There has been
much discussion of their meaning into which it is impossible
here to enter. But whatever questions modern scholarship may
raise, there can be little doubt as to the sense in which Christ’s
words were understood by the first disciples. “His own self,”
said Peter, “bare our sins in His body upon the tree.” “Herein is
love,” said John, “not that we loved God, but that He loved us,
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and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” He “loved
me,” said Paul, “and gave Himself for me.” It is open,
doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these apostolic
deductions, and to fall back upon Matthew Arnold’s
Aberglaube; but who, it has been well said, “are most likely to
have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus
attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an
equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and
candid, who undertake to reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and
to disentangle them from the supposed subjective reflections of
His disciples? Where is the subjectivity likely to be the greatest
—in the interpretations of the eye and ear witness, or in the
reconstructions of the moderns?”[22]
Christ gave His life “a ransom for many.” The truth cannot be
put too simply: “God forgives our sins because Christ died for
them;” “in that death of Christ our condemnation came upon
Him, that for us there might be condemnation no more;” “the
forfeiting of His free life has freed our forfeited lives.”[23]
“Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood;
Alleluia! what a Saviour!”
If this is true, the New Testament has a meaning, and, what is
more, we sinful men have a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult
to know why the New Testament was written, and still more
difficult to know what we must do to be saved. It does not help
to point us to the parable of the Prodigal Son, and tell us that
there is a story of salvation without an atonement. The whole
gospel cannot be put into a parable, not even into such a parable
as this. Besides, if the argument proves anything, it proves too
50

much. The parable is not only a story of salvation without an
atonement, it is a story of salvation without Christ; and if no
more is needed than what is given here, Christ Himself is no
part of His own gospel, forgiveness can be had with no
reference to Him. But it is not so the redeemed have learned
Christ; it is not thus they have received forgiveness. They know
that it is “in Him” they have their redemption, through His
blood; and apart from Him there is no salvation and no gospel.
It is time to bring our reasonings to an end. We are under the
shadow of the Cross; let us worship and adore. When Christ
died on the tree nineteen hundred years ago, there were some
that mocked, and some that watched and yet saw nothing—
nothing but a miserable criminal’s miserable end; a few there
were that wept, and one there was who cried, with lips already
white with death, “Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in
Thy kingdom.” And still does that Cross divide men. Where is
our place, and with whom are we? Not, I think, with them that
mock; for these to-day are a broken and discredited few. We
choose rather the centurion’s cry, “Certainly this was a
righteous man.” But is this all we have to say? He who gave
His life-blood for us, shall He have no more than this—the little
penny-pieces of our respect? If we owe Him aught we owe Him
all; and if we give Him aught let us give Him all—not our
thanks but our souls. “He loved me, and gave Himself up for
me”—
there is the secret of the Cross which no man knows save he
who cannot speak of it without the personal pronouns. Until
then we are but as blind watchers that look and see not. “Jesus,
remember me”—this is the word that becomes us best. Let us
cry unto Him now, and He who heard the robber’s prayer on the
Cross will hear and save us.
51

V - CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
“Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire;
Thou the Anointing Spirit art,
Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart.
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love:
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight;
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace;
Keep far our foes; give peace at home;
Where Thou art guide no ill can come;
Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And Thee of Both, to be but One:
That, through the ages all along,
This, this may be our endless song,
‘Praise to Thy eternal merit,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!’”
Amen!
BISHOP JOHN COSIN.
* * * * *
_”I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit
52

of truth.”_--JOHN xiv. 16.
_”It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not
away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I
will send Him unto you.”_--JOHN xvi. 7.
It was the night in which He was betrayed. Jesus and His
disciples were spending their last hours together before His
death. For Him the morrow could bring with it no surprise. He
knew that His hour was come—the hour to which all other
hours of His past had pointed; and He was ready.
Before He left that Upper Room, He lifted up His eyes to
heaven and said, “Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son.”
But to the disciples that night was a night of darkness, and
terror, and confusion. They remembered how He had told them
He must die; they knew the bloodhounds in Jerusalem were on
His track; they could see the shadow’s black edge creeping
nearer and nearer; and yet they could do nothing; they could not
even persuade Him that anything needed to be done. Nay, it
almost seemed as if He were taking part with His enemies
against them. “It is expedient for you,” He said, “that I go
away”—veiling in His pity the horror of His going.
“Expedient” for them? How could He speak like that?
Was He not everything to them? If He went away, what was to
befall them?
They would be as sheep in the midst of wolves, as orphans in
an unkindly world. Is it any wonder that sorrow filled their
hearts?
And not only to these His first disciples, but to many of His
followers in later days, this word of Jesus has proved a hard
53

saying. If only, we think, He were with us as He was with Peter
and James and John; if only we could hear Him teach in our
streets, or in our church, as once He taught in the streets of
Jerusalem and the synagogue at Nazareth; if only He could
enter our homes, as once He entered the home at Bethany, how
easy it would be to believe! But, now He is no longer here, the
air is filled with doubting voices, and faith is very hard.So
sometimes we speak. But, have we noticed, this is never the
language of the New Testament. To begin with, it is not the
language of Christ.
There is an unmistakable emphasis in His words: “Because I
have spoken these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your
heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is expedient for you
that I go away.” When Paul was a prisoner in Rome, he wrote
to the Philippians, saying, “I am in a strait betwixt the two,
having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far
better; yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake.”
That is how a good man, in the prospect of death, naturally
feels towards those who are in any way dependent on him. But
Christ’s language is the very opposite of this; He says, not that
it is needful to abide, but that it is expedient to depart. And in
every reference to Christ by the apostles after His Ascension,
the same note is struck. It is hardly too much to say, as one
writer does, “that no apostle, no New Testament writer, ever
remembered Christ.”[24] They thought of Him as belonging,
not to the past, but to the present; He was the object, not of
memory, but of faith. Never do they wish Him back in their
midst; never do they mourn for Him as for a friend whom they
have lost. On the contrary, they felt that Christ was with them
now in a sense in which He had never been. There is no hint
that any even of the Twelve would have gone back to the old
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days had it been possible. They had lost, but they had also
gained, and their gain was greater than their loss. “Even though
we have known Christ after the flesh,” they also would have
said, “yet now we know Him so no more.” Read over again St.
Luke’s account of our Lord’s Ascension: “He led them out until
they were over against Bethany; and He lifted up His hands and
blessed them. And it came to pass, while He blessed them, He
parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they
worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and
were continually in the temple, blessing God.” Christ had gone
from them a second time, no more to return as before He had
returned from the tomb; yet now it is not despair but joy which
fills their hearts: “They returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”
When in the Upper Room, Christ had said, “It is expedient for
you that I go away,” sorrow had filled their hearts; but, now
that He is gone, their sorrow is turned into joy. How shall we
explain this strange reversal?
I
It is to be explained in part, of course, by the Resurrection of
Christ from the dead, but mainly—and this is the fact with
which just now we are concerned—by the gift of the Holy
Spirit whom Christ had promised to His disciples to abide with
them for ever. But now, what do we mean when we speak of
the gift of the Holy Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is
it that He does for us? Many of us, I think, must have felt how
extremely unreal, and therefore unsatisfying, the discussions of
this great subject often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find
a place among the proved realities of our Christian experience.
55

It remains, so to speak, outside of us, a foreign substance which
life has not assimilated. And hence it has come to pass that
there is no small danger to-day lest New Testament phrases
about being filled with the Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, and
so forth, become the mere jargon of a school which wholly fails
to interpret the mind of Christ. Doubtless there are faults on
both sides, the faults of neglect and the faults of false emphasis,
and for both the true remedy is a more careful study of the
teaching of Jesus.
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it He does for us? “I
will pray the Father,” Christ said, “and He shall give you
another Comforter,” or “another Paraclete.” The word
translated “Comforter,” which occurs so often in this discourse
of our Lord, is found nowhere else in the New Testament
except in the First Epistle of St. John, where it is rendered
“Advocate”; “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the
Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.” And this, without doubt, is
a more faithful rendering of the word which Christ used than
the more familiar “Comforter.” An advocate is one who is
called to our side to be our friend and helper, more especially to
plead our cause in a court of justice; and this also is the
meaning of the word “Paraclete.” Perhaps, however, the word
“Comforter” may be retained without loss, if only we remember
to give it its full and original meaning. To “comfort” is not
primarily and originally to console, but to strengthen, to
_fort_ify; and the “Comforter” whom Christ promised to His
disciples was not only one who should soothe them in their
sorrows, but should stand by them in all their conflicts, their
unfailing friend and helper.
56

Further, Christ said God “shall give you another Comforter.”
That is to say, Christ Himself was a Comforter, and all that He
had been to His disciples the Holy Spirit should be also. And, if
we examine the three chapters of this Gospel which contain this
great discourse of our Lord, we shall find this idea taken up,
and repeated, and developed in passage after passage. The Holy
Spirit was to come in Christ’s name, as Christ’s representative
and interpreter. “He shall not speak from Himself,” Christ said;
“He shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me; for He shall
take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.” In the presence of
the Spirit Christ Himself would be present: “I will not leave you
desolate,” He said; “I come unto you;” “I will see you again,
and your heart shall rejoice.” And, for the sake of such a
presence, a presence which was to be not for a little while but
for ever, it was best for His friends that He should leave them.
[25]
It is in these words, I believe, that we have the key to the New
Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of
Christ; He is sent by Christ; He comes to continue the work of
Christ.
He is, as one writer has it, Christ’s alter ego, or, as it was said
long ago, Christ’s “Vicar,” or substitute, on the earth.[26]
When, therefore, we speak of the presence of the Spirit, what
we mean, or what we ought to mean, is the spiritual presence of
Christ. In the Holy Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever,
as He said, two or three are gathered together in His name. In
the Holy Spirit, given to be with us for ever, He makes good to
His disciples the great word of His promise, “Lo, I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the world.” This is the fact
continually to be kept in mind—the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ;
for, if this be forgotten, then, as all experience shows, either the
57

doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the subject of that
vague, unreal way of speaking, which, alas! is so often the bane
of spiritual truth.
At the same time, what has been said must not be interpreted so
as to suggest that the Holy Spirit is merely an impersonal
influence. On the contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above
distinctly imply what we call “personality,” and a personality
separate from His own. If all that Jesus really meant to teach
was that He would manifest His own invisible presence to His
disciples by spiritual influences, we can only conclude that His
words have been tampered with; as they stand, it is impossible
that this should exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear
witness, to guide, to bring to remembrance, to declare the things
that are to come,--these are the acts, not of a Power, but of a
Person; and all these things, Christ said, the Holy Spirit should
do. Indeed, it is not easy to see how language could have been
framed to set forth the idea of a Divine Person, separate alike
from the Father and the Son, more explicitly than we find it in
these chapters.[27]
II
We turn now to the second part of our question: What is it that
the Holy Spirit does for us? Christ’s teaching on the work of the
Spirit may be gathered up under two heads: (1) His work in the
Church; (2) His work in the world.
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(1) When we speak of the Spirit’s work in the Church, it
must be understood that the reference is to no particular
ecclesiastical
organization, but to the people of Christ generally, “the men
and women in whom the spiritual work of Christ is going
forward.” And among these the Holy Spirit works in two ways.
(_a_) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Remembrancer: “He
shall guide you into all the truth;” “He shall take of Mine, and
shall declare it unto you;” “He shall teach you all things, and
bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.” It is not, it
will be observed, all truth, but all the truth of Christ, with which
the Spirit deals—the truth concerning Him, and the truth which
He taught. Nor is it a new revelation which the Spirit gives, but
rather a more perfect understanding of that which has been
already given in Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try all
that claims the authority of spiritual truth. Does it “glorify”
Christ? Does it lead us into a fuller knowledge of Him “in
whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”?
“Whosoever goeth onward,” says St. John, in a remarkable
passage, for which English readers are indebted to the Revised
Version, “and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not
God.” In other words, no true progress is possible except as we
abide in Christ. If He be ignored and left behind, though we still
keep the name and boast ourselves “progressives,” we have lost
the reality. On the other hand, every new discovery, every
movement in the life of men, every intellectual and spiritual
awakening which serves to make manifest the glory of Christ as
Creator, or Revealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh fulfilment of His
promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth.
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Perhaps our best commentary is the history of the Church. In
the New Testament itself we have the first-fruits of the Spirit’s
work. There we may see, in Gospels and Epistles, how the
Spirit took of the things of Christ and showed them unto His
disciples. And all through the varied history of the Church’s
long past, that same Divine Remembrancer has been at work,
calling us through the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or a
Wesley, into the fullness of the inheritance of truth which is
ours in Christ Jesus.
(_b_) The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. “Behold,” said the
ascending Christ, “I send forth the promise of My Father upon
you; but tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with power from
on high.” And, again, “Ye shall receive power, when the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.” Of Jesus Himself it was said by one
of His disciples “that God anointed Him with the Holy Ghost
and with power”; and of His disciples Jesus said: “He that
believeth on Me, the works that I do shall He do also; and
greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the
Father.”
Here, again, our best commentary is the history of the Church,
and especially the first chapter of that history as it is written in
the Acts of the Apostles. This was the promise, “Ye shall
receive power,” and this, in brief, the story of its fulfilment,
“With great power gave the apostles their witness of the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” Let any one read the early
chapters of St. Luke’s narrative; let him mark the utter disparity
between the “acts” and the “apostles”—between the things
done and the men by whom they were done—and then let him
ask if there is any explanation which does really bridge the gulf
short of this, that behind Peter and John and the rest there stood
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Another, speaking through their lips, working through their
hands, Himself the real Doer in all those wondrous “acts”?
When D.L. Moody was holding in Birmingham one of those
remarkable series of meetings which so deeply stirred our
country in the early ‘seventies, Dr. Dale, who followed the
work with the keenest sympathy, and yet not without a feeling
akin to stupefaction at the amazing results which it produced,
once told Moody that the work was most plainly of God, for he
could see no real relation between him and what he had done. Is
not this disparity the very sign-manual of the Holy Spirit’s
presence? “Why,” asked Peter, when the multitude were filled
with wonder and amazement at the healing of the lame man,
“Why fasten ye your eyes on us as though by our own power or
godliness we had made him to walk?” Work that is really of
God can never be accounted for in that fashion. There is always
a something in the effects which cannot be traced back to a
human cause. Let “our own power and godliness” be what they
may—and they can never be too great—they are all vain and
helpless apart from the power of God. “I planted, Apollos
watered; God gave the increase.” Wherefore let the Church trust
neither in him that planteth nor in him that watereth, but in God
who giveth the increase.
(2) We come now to the Holy Spirit’s work in the world.
And, just as in speaking of the “Church” it was not any visible
organization which we had in mind, so now by the “world” is
not meant merely the persons who are outside all such
organizations. There is, as we are often reminded nowadays, a
Church outside the Churches; and, on the other hand, not a little
of what Christ meant by the “world” is often to be found inside
what we mean by the “Church.” The “world,” then, is simply
the mass of men, wherever they are to be found, who are living
61

apart from God. Now, of this world Christ said it “cannot
receive” the Spirit of truth; “it beholdeth Him not, neither
knoweth Him.” If, therefore, there is a ministry of the Spirit in
the world, it must be wholly different in kind from that spoken
of above. And this is what we learn from Christ’s teaching:
“He, when He is come, will convict the world in respect of sin,
and of righteousness, and of judgment.” There is a ring of
judicial sternness in the words; they call up to our minds the
solemnities of a court of justice—the indictment, the
conviction, the condemnation. And yet one can well believe
that there were hours in the after life of the apostles when, of all
the comforting, reassuring words which Christ had spoken to
them in that Upper Room, there were none more helpful than
these. For they knew now that, when they stood up to bear their
witness before a hostile world, they had a fellow-witness in
men’s hearts. They could go nowhere—in Jerusalem, Judaea,
Samaria, or the uttermost parts of the earth—where the gracious
ministries of the Spirit had not preceded them. He, the
Paraclete, was not only with them, their “strong-siding
Champion,” He was in the world also, in the hearts even of
them who set themselves most stoutly against the Lord and
against His Anointed, subduing their rebelliousness and
reconciling them to God. We who teach and preach to-day, do
we think of these things as we ought?
Does not our message sometimes win a response which is at
once a surprise and a rebuke to us? We knew that the seed
which we cast into the ground was the word of God; but the soil
seemed so poor and thin we scarce had looked for any harvest;
yet the seed sprang up and grew, we knew not how. We had
forgotten that over all that wide field which is the world the
Divine Husbandman is ever at work, at work while men sleep,
62

breaking up the fallow ground, and making ready the soil for
the seed. We need to learn to count more on God, to grasp more
fully the glorious breadth of promise which He has given us in
His Spirit, to remember that, not only in the Church, but in the
world—which is His world—that Spirit is always present to
testify of God, to convict men of sin, of righteousness, and of
judgment.
And yet, while we encourage ourselves with thoughts like
these, we dare not forget that men may resist, they may grieve,
they may quench the Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He
is resisted; He may be resisted until He is quenched. It was
Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against the Holy Spirit which
“hath never forgiveness.” Is there any more painful, perplexing,
and yet more certain fact in life than this, that man can resist
God? Is there any that has bound up with it more terrible and
inevitable issues? “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart
and ears,” cried the martyr Stephen to his judges, “ye do always
resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.” And the
end for their fathers and for them we know. Wherefore the Holy
Spirit saith: “To-day, if ye shall hear His voice, harden not your
hearts.”
63

VI - CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF
GOD
“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”—ST.
PAUL.
* * * * *
“_Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth._”—MATT. vi. 10.
I
One of the most obvious features of the teaching of Jesus is the
prominence which it gives to what is called “the kingdom of
heaven,” or, “the kingdom of God.” And this prominence
becomes the more striking when we turn from the Gospels to
the Epistles where the phrase is only rarely to be found. With
Jesus the kingdom was a kind of watchword which was
continually on His lips. Thus, e.g., St. Mark begins his account
of the preaching of Jesus in these words: “After that John was
delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of
God and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God
is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the Gospel.” In like
64

manner, St. Matthew tells us that “Jesus went about in all
Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel
of the kingdom.” Parable after parable opens with the formula
“The kingdom of heaven is like unto--,” or, “So is the kingdom
of God as if--,” or, “How shall we liken the kingdom of God?”
When Christ sent forth the Twelve, this was His command, “Go
... and as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
hand.” Again, when He sent forth the Seventy, He said, “Into
whatsoever city ye enter ... say unto them, The kingdom of God
is come nigh unto you.” And in the great Forty Days, before He
was received up, it was still of “the things concerning the
kingdom of God” that He spake unto His disciples. Every time
a little child is baptized we call to mind His words, “For of such
is the kingdom of God.” Every time we repeat the prayer He
taught His disciples to pray we say, “Thy kingdom come.” In
all, it is said, there are no less than one hundred and twelve
references to the kingdom to be found in the Gospels.
When, however, we turn to the Epistles what do we find? In the
whole of St. Paul’s Epistles the kingdom is not named as often
as in the briefest of the four Gospels. It is mentioned only once
by St. Peter, once by St. James, once by the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and not at all in the three Epistles of St.
John. Not only so, but at least until quite recent times, the
Church of Christ has in the main followed the lead of the
apostles, and has said but little of the kingdom of God. How is
this to be explained? Does it mean that the whole Church of
Christ, including the Church of the apostles, has failed to
understand the mind of the Master, and has let slip an essential
element of His teaching? So some recent writers do not hesitate
to declare. Burke once said that he did not know how to draw
65

The Teaching Of Jesus By The Rev. George Jackson - ebook

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